Emergency archeology 1: a dig in the V&A’s photography archive
The Madrasa al-Halawiyya is hidden in the shadow of the great Umayyad mosque in Aleppo, accessible through an arch along a narrow side alley and bounded by the French and Venetian khans. This seclusion gave the building some protection when, between 2013 and the last months of 2016, it was just meters from the front line across which opposition and government forces battled for control of Aleppo; it has survived the war, but neither intact nor undamaged.
The madrasa is a modest building loaded with historical, architectural and religious significance. In Syria it is ordinary to discover one layer of history built upon many others; the Madrasa al-Halawiyya is nonetheless a special site with a pedigree that spans one and a half millennia. A colonnaded apse in the prayer hall is a remnant of the sixth century Byzantine cathedral, built in the reign of Justinian to replace an earlier church built in the early fifth century and dedicated to Emporer Constantine’s mother, Saint Helena. In 1124, after over 400 hundred years of coexistence between Christians and Moslems, a brutal but failed siege by the Franks provoked the seizure of the basilica and it became a mosque. Nur al-Din, the Sultan of Aleppo and vanquisher of both crusaders and apostates, rebuilt the mosque in around 1149 as a madrasa to promote Sunni revivalism. In an Iwan (a vaulted arch) leading off the courtyard there is a magnificent Ayyubid mihrab, or prayer niche, carved entirely from wood inlaid with ivory by Alepan carpenters and dated 643H./1245.
The building was not often visited by tourists but drew the attention of scholars, architects and interested travellers, keen to see the mihrab and the west apse of the prayer hall, with its semi-dome supported by Byzantine columns topped by the most exquisitely carved acanthus leaf capitals you will ever see. Gertrude Bell, the British antiquarian and spy, photographed the apse in 1909. K.A.C. Creswell, a British army officer, made a meticulous photographic record of the interior and exterior of the madrasa in 1919; this still exists, with prints and negatives in Egyptian, Italian, British and American museum libraries.
In Summer 2016 I knew nothing of Creswell. I was on a different errand in the V&A digital archive when I stumbled across one of his photographs. The caption — ’A view of Syria’ and ‘Interior looking south’ — was uninformative, but I recognised the building from a visit to Aleppo in 2004. A quick Google search turned up an identical image (apparently inverted from the negative) at the Aga Khan funded archnet.org; it was a poor reproduction at low resolution but correctly identified as Madrasa al-Halawiyya. There I also found another interior and two exterior shots by Creswell and, elsewhere, a number of contemporary photographs of the building. So began two lines of enquiry: an internet hunt to discover the fate of the madrasa — not just what had happened during the war, then still raging, but also its recent history; the other an experiment in linking together the different parts of the Creswell archive and related documentation and objects in the V&A.
The madrasa photographed by Creswell and Bell was in many respects quite different from the building I had visited in 2004; and that building was different again from the one that stood along the alley behind the Great Mosque at the start of the uprising in 2011. What emerged from this search was a pictorial biography of a site over 107 years that showed five distinct cycles of addition, dilapidation and restoration; it demonstrated that there was no obvious or definitive state that any future restorer should aspire to, but that the museum record created informed choices and more and better data to work with; it also showed that both museum and other public records were often inaccessible, below conservation standard, inaccurately described and disconnected from secondary documentation and even from each other. That’s normal, everybody knows that: why should we care and what could be done about it?
To find an answer we might return to Creswell and his life’s work. After the Armistice in 1918, Creswell was commissioned by General Allenby to make an inventory of historic buildings across British-controlled territories in the region. Between 1919 and 1920, as Inspector of Monuments in former Ottoman territories, and later as a professor at Fuad I University (today Cairo University), Creswell photographed hundreds of Islamic sites in Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt. The results of his research were numerous notes, hand-drawn plans, books and articles including three major works, and at least 14,000 photographic prints and negatives. These photographs now constitute an invaluable record of lost, extant and threatened buildings and they are held collectively by five institutions.
The Ashmolean Museum holds around 8000 negatives that were transferred from Cairo — via Royal Navy Destroyer from Port Said to Portsmouth — to Oxford, one year after Creswell’s death in 1974; these are available online but at very low resolution. The V&A holds 3,374 photographs obtained in the 1920s, a large proportion of which are scanned at high resolution and available online at low-medium resolution; The American University in Cairo has 7,850 photographic prints and negatives, in part scanned at high resolution but none available online; the Harvard Library has 2,741 photographs available online at low resolution but with good text data, via archnet; the Berenson archive at Villa I Tatti (the collector and art historian Bernard Berenson supported Creswell’s work financially) has 2810 photographs, not available online. Bell’s photographs are held by Newcastle University, available online at low resolution. This means that none of the institutions holding Creswell material give ready availability to high resolution images and only Harvard/archnet offers good subject data or related images or archives.
At the V&A, it turned out that there were others interested in Creswell and his work. Erika Lederman, a photography curator, was researching Creswell’s relationship with the V&A, acquisition records, his letters and his printing technique. Omniya Abdel Barr, an Islamic scholar, was using Creswell’s photographs to identify ornament and fixtures looted from Mamluk sites in Cairo after the 2011 uprising. Together, we discovered a small catalogue of errors and intrigue that demonstrated the huge potential value of good digital conservation and publication.
We also found that the photographic record of Madrasa al-Halawiyya was a microcosm of everything that was right and wrong with the current digitisation of the archive.
To determine which print of the apse was inverted — the V&A’s or Harvard Library’s — we obtained a high resolution digital image which, after image adjustment, showed what the naked eye could not see, which was that a tablet above the central columns contained an arabic inscription (“my mercy extends to all things”) that was clearly back to front: it was Creswell who had inverted his own print from the negative before he sold it to the V&A in 1921. A further error by Creswell was the handwritten caption “interior looking south” (the orientation is to the west) and then one by the museum, which had digitally scanned only a portion of the mount, cutting out the essential information “Aleppo, Syria, Madrassat al-Halawiya”, subsequently lost too from the digital catalogue. Later by chance we came across a digital record of a print of the mihrab, previously known only from a negative in the Ashmolean; this record had not been associated with the other four prints of the Madrasa — and the print itself was, soon after, found in a cupboard in the print library.
These errors are hardly surprising in a collection that’s barely been touched in the 90-plus years since it was acquired, or one that was scanned hurriedly in a poorly funded digitisation programme. Scans have been made at high resolution, but of incomplete portions of the work; the scans are available to the public at an enfeebled resolution for no obvious technical or commercial reason; the data supporting the objects is inaccurate and incomplete; the objects are not associated with works about them (for example Creswell’s notes, plans, books) or to other related museum holdings in the V&A or elsewhere; there is no means of enabling outside scholars, researchers or interested parties to suggest improvements to the data; the interface for acquiring the data is designed as a museum record rather than as a useful public tool.
The destruction of Nimrud, Palmyra and the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul have focused attention on the rapid recording of threatened sites using photogrammetry and long rage scanning. However, the Creswell and similar archives remind us that the world’s museums and libraries are a rich mine of cultural memory — and especially if we make better use of established digital technologies to connect them together.
The lesson is clear: we should aim higher. Instead of low resolution reference imaging, we should make high resolution scans freely available to the public. Museums have the habit of limiting data quality to hoard commercial opportunities that they rarely exploit, but the works are a public good and should be treated as such as well as being the best possible advert for on demand printing in a museum. We should invest resources in creating accurate data around the object and in linking an object with works about it or the subject matter. We should also enable external academics, researchers or interested parties to use the material for reasonable purposes and let them suggest corrections to the data or make useful connections, including using image and other data on their own websites: the latter is an especially valuable attribute where collections are divided across institutions, as is the case with the Creswell archive. These archives can be connected and compared, allowing new knowledge to emerge.
There is an ambition to bring the different parts of the Creswell collection together and make high resolution digital scans available for conservation purposes, as well as making his written works and drawings — many of which are out of copyright — available as an open source resource. A small combined team created a prototype that demonstrates how the photographic archives can be integrated with Creswell’s notes, drawings and books and with external photographic resources (both historical and contemporary) to establish a collective document of architectural sites. This will be an important supplement to the work that Syrian architects, archaeologists and scholars are already undertaking to protect buildings and their fabric from damage, theft or destructive changes and to preserve the memory of detail that might otherwise be lost.
This article is number one of a series:
You can see the prototype here: Emergency archeology 2: prototyping a digital Creswell archive of Islamic architecture
And there’s a visual biography of the madrasa and description of its post-war condition here: Emergency archeology 3: a century of change at Aleppo’s Madrasa al-Halawiyya
